Email the department office
Work & EmailWritingStudy
State your situation and what you need to know, and get a short, polite email to the department office.
Fill the blanks and it copies as you filled it
Write an email to the department office. - What it's about: - My situation: - What I want to ask: - Polite and short. A one-line subject and a body of three paragraphs or fewer
0 of 3 blanks filled · anything left blank copies with its brackets
Setting a length means cutting padding, not writing stiffly. For writing that needs to be roundabout — a personal statement, an email to a professor — add a line about tone. The paper also reports that specifying a length shorter than the task needs backfires, because it drives follow-up questions (a 34% increase in 11% of scenarios).
What this prompt does
Compared with asking the same thing without the length and format lines.estimate
Estimated output tokens
1,400
Asked loosely
700
This prompt
Energy (Wh)
1.215
Asked loosely
1.215
This prompt
Tokens estimated from characters; energy measured by Jegham et al. 2025.
A shorter answer, but the same energy band — the measurements are per band.
Reported backfire — Specifying output lengthSpecifying a length longer than needed backfires (a 34% increase in 11% of scenarios)
Where these figures come from
Published figures for the rule itself — not what this prompt saves.
Assigning a role
44%mean reduction · 95% CI 29–59%
Podder et al. 2026 BP#4 · 19 use cases / 61 prompts
by modelGPT-4o 34%Command R+ 50%Mistral-7B 49%
Specifying output length
38.7%mean reduction · 95% CI 29.7–47.7%
Podder et al. 2026 BP#5 · 18 use cases / 57 prompts
by modelGPT-4o 35%Command R+ 49%Mistral-7B 32%
Reduced in every scenario. No backfire reported